Humanising history

The fiction of Scott, the poetry of Byron and the paintings of Turner are part of a Romantic tradition which endures today, writes Fiona MacCarthy. Their vision of the past - subjective, panoramic and glowing with moral indignation - is heightened by threats of war and extinction

'I can re-people with the past," wrote Byron in the Italian canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage . Byron's Venice in particular was a crowded scene. It thronged with the figures of its 1,000 years of history, the ghosts of the dead Doges, their attendants, their processions. It swarmed with fictional characters familiar to Byron from his childhood reading. He was open to encounters with Shakespeare's Shylock and Otway's Pierre on the Rialto, Schiller's sinister Armenian at the moonlit entrance to St. Mark's Square. Byron had invented a whole new way of looking, drawing on his personal amalgam of historic panoramas and literary echoes to give force to his current political objections to the occupation of Venice by the Austrians. Instead of attempting factual objectivity, Byron evolved an attitude to past events that was visual, emotional and morally argumentative: "a truth of history... and of place".

The visionary intensity of Byron's poetry had its counterpart in Walter Scott's novels. Publication of the final canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1818 was followed a year later by Scott's Ivanhoe . Scott was already famous for the Waverley novels, but this was the first of his books dealing with an English subject and the first of his narratives of the Middle Ages as opposed to the late 17th and 18th centuries. For Scott the effect of going further back in time to the reign of Richard I had a loosening effect on his imagination. The excitement for his contemporary readers was that this was indeed history, rooted in recognisable historical events, but history filled in with colour, detail, human empathy. Through his marvellous descriptive authenticity, Scott managed to convey the emotional texture of the past. He was a master of the spectacular. His history had a profound effect on European visual art.

Scott and Byron were writing in a period when the barriers between Britain and France, in place through the decades of the Napoleonic wars, had been finally demolished after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The almost frenzied cultural exchanges that followed are the subject of a Tate Britain exhibition - Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics - which is one of the most riveting of recent years. The new British view of history was suddenly exportable and seized on by numerous French painters enraptured by the pictorial possibilities of such subjects as the princes in the Tower, Cromwell at Windsor Castle and the execution of Lady Jane Grey.

In this new high-romantic French fixation with narrative, Scott and Byron, read widely in translation, emerged as the twin stars. Delacroix, for example, painted his own versions of the episodes of Rebecca's abduction in Ivanhoe and the assassination of the Bishop of Liège in Quentin Durward . It has been estimated that more than 200 paintings based on Scott's novels were shown in major French exhibitions between 1822 and 1837. Britain's historic sites became a favoured destination for visitors in pursuit of Scott vibrations. One continental tourist was spotted at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire with a copy of Scott's Kenilworth in his hand.

"We do not want facts, we want the philosophical spectacle of a man profoundly moved by the passions of his character and his times." When Alfred de Vigny wrote these words in 1825, in the introduction to his own high-romantic historical novel Cinq-Mars , Byron had been dead a year. But his reputation in continental Europe was still in the ascendant as his grandly sardonic view of the whole cycle of events in Europe from the French revolution onwards began to be more deeply understood.

Byron had died not in action but near to it, at Missolonghi in western Greece. The call for liberty from a famous poet who had sacrificed his talent, his fortune and his life for it provided an emotive focus for French support for the Greek war of independence against the occupying Turks. When Delacroix painted his epic landscape portrait of suffering humanity, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, he was commemorating a real event of recent history, the exodus of April 22 1826 when 7,000 starving citizens of Missolonghi attempted to break out of the city, then under long-term Turkish siege. When the exodus failed, groups of despairing townspeople blew themselves up with their powder magazines rather than surrender. The city was soon laid to waste. Delacroix's painting has its own Byronic layerings of meaning and build-up of high emotion, lamenting Byron's own corresponding drama of human sacrifice.

The subjective, panoramic view of history originated by Byron and Scott suggested new modes of expression to French artists, a more fluid, more personal way of making pictures compared with the native neo-classical tradition. "To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts," wrote Baudelaire. The discovery by French painters of the technical possibilities of watercolour had important repercussions as the century progressed. But it was of course an English artist, Turner, who was most directly and movingly affected by Byron's haunted landscapes and his morality of past events, taking his poetry as the starting point for creative visions of his own in an interaction of the verbal and visual that is one of the peaks of English art.

Between 1818 and 1844, six of Turner's paintings, populated vistas of Italy, Belgium and the Rhine, were exhibited with the quotations from Childe Harold that inspired them. All six paintings were assembled as the memorable centrepiece of the Tate's exhibition, Turner and Byron, in 1992. One of these, from the Tate's own collection, has been chosen for the current exhibition. It is a landscape peopled with piled-up corpses, a Byronic evocation of The Field of Waterloo .

Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,

Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay, The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife, The moon the marshalling in arms, - the day

Battle's magnificently-stern array!

The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent

The earth is covered thick with other clay,

Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,

Rider and horse, - friend, foe, - in one red burial blent!

Byron wrote those lines in 1816, after his own visit to the battlefield, which he rode across on a Cossack horse, pausing now and then in what he called "a musing mood". Turner's composition, lit by the flares of battle and the burning farm of Hougoument, magnificently dramatises Byron's anger and despair at wasteful carnage as the women search for those they loved among the tangled corpses of the French and Scottish soldiers. It glows with the moral indignation that was at the heart of the Romantic view of history: human feeling for the individual caught up, not always knowingly or willingly, in the march of world events.

In seven years' work on a biography of Byron, I got to know the way his mind worked: how a sudden passage in a book he had been reading or a stretch of countryside or a statue glimpsed in Rome could set off a whole creative reaction, an unstoppable succession of associations. This reminded me forcibly of what I had discovered while researching William Morris. Such connections are among the secret pleasures of biography. For Morris, as for Byron, landscapes were not simply landscapes but events full of resonance and meaning. It was partly a question, for both, of factual knowledge: the minds of both were well-stocked in a way few people's minds would be today. But it was also a question of responsiveness to the fullness of history, not just chronology but the cycles and patterns, the legends and the mystery. They saw both the beauty and the uses of the past.

As a child, Morris rode out into the Essex country in the miniature suit of armour his loving parents bought him. This was the precocious reader who had started on the Waverley novels at the age of four and read Scott's complete works by the time he was seven. He was already susceptible to ecstasy, "that delightful quickening of the perception by which everything gets emphasised and bright ened, and the commonest landscape looks lovely". Ecstasy for Morris involved the recreation of history.

In Epping forest, he envisioned troops of larger knights in armour. Later, at school at Marlborough, he explored the Wiltshire landscape of strange prehistoric monuments, earth barrows and tumuli, conscious of the labour gangs of ancient Britons constructing the great bulk of Silbury Hill. Travelling in Iceland in the 1870s, after an intensive phase of reading and translating the Icelandic sagas, Morris could summon up, in all its highly coloured operatic detail of tribal dress and emblematic banners, the primitive Icelandic democratic parliament that met every summer, from 930 onwards, on the great plain of Thingvellir. He proposed the Icelandic system as a blueprint to his British Socialist colleagues of the 1880s, without notable success.

This Romantic and evocative attitude to ancientness flowed out into the work of Morris and Burne-Jones, that great Victorian double act of art and artefacts. They were addicts of Malory, having first come upon Southey's edition of the Morte d'Arthur when they were still Oxford undergraduates, and Malory's stories were the basis for the series of tempera murals, still dimly in situ, which the young artists painted under Rossetti's direction in the Oxford Union in 1857. Visions of the Arthurian permeate their work, most dramatically and obviously in the huge scale and refulgent colours of the six narrative tapestries, The Quest of the San Graal , a collaborative triumph of the 1890s. More eccentrically and touchingly, many of the quasi-Biblical figures in Morris & Co designs for stained glass windows are in fact much more Arthurian. A medieval Mary hears the Annunciation in an English country meadow dotted with bright daisies. The Martin who shares his cloak with the beggar is a knight in chain mail riding a stocky English horse.

One striking result of Morris's addictive recapitulation of the past was the way it encouraged a back-to-the-land movement among artists and craftsmen in the early 20th century. This took the form of a real-life re-peopling, a do-it-yourself historicism as these converts to country life reinvented the folk tales and the folk song, recreated local ceremonial and pageantry, making their own Romantic landscapes as a bastion against commercial exploitation, environmental and political catastrophe.

The 20th century saw a revival of Romantic watercolour, in which David Jones is surely the key figure. Threats of war and extinction heighten Romanticism, and Jones served in the trenches on the Western Front from 1915 to 1918, a private in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He did not fight in, but he suffered much from, the second world war. His knotty, complex, funny, highly intellectual poetry has always had its voluble admirers: TS Eliot called David Jones's "In Parenthesis", his long prose poem of the first world war, "a work of genius". WH Auden saw "The Anathemata", Jones's Roman Catholic and philosophical epic, as "very probably the finest long poem written in English" in the 20th century. Jones's painting remains very underrated. Once William Blake has been agreed as the exception, people are lazily reluctant to admit supremacy in two creative spheres.

And yet Jones's paintings are as extraordinary as his poetry. With his avid sense of history and nervy disposition, Jones was a constant and a wonderful imaginer. Like Morris, he was steeped in the Arthurian. His Welsh ancestors and years spent living as part of the family of Eric Gill at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains sharpened his identification with the Celtic. Gill, the patriarch, would hold the household in thrall with his readings from Malory. Jones re-peopled the hills and woods spurting streams he could see from his window (he liked painting through a window) with episodes of the Welsh Celtic epic, the Mabinogion.

In 1941, back in London during the blitz, Jones was reading Spengler's Decline of the West . He was completing work, after a long and anxious gestation, on his most marvellous of paintings, Aphrodite in Aulis , now in the Tate. The naked goddess, not simply Aphrodite but the sum and symbol of all female icon figures - Phryne, Iphigenia, the Madonna - stands enchained upon a pillar. Looking up, assessing her in her big-breasted promise and her Primavera brightness, are two Roman centurions who are also English Tommies in the domed bronze helmets of the first world war.

The painting is a highly wrought and delicate amalgam, a collage of Jones's main imaginative preoccupations: reminiscent, cyclical, sacrificial, sexual. The distant vistas are classical, mythical and faerie. But there is at the same time a down-to-earthness in the painting that is itself Romantic and peculiar to Jones. This reminds us that his sense of historical connection was not just in great events but in human everydayness. As he wrote in the preface to "In Parenthesis", even in times of crisis we still "stroke cats, pluck flowers, tie ribands, assist in the normal acts of religion, make some kind of love, write poems, paint pictures, are generally at one with the creaturely world inherited from our remote past".

In the second world war, historic places came to appear more precious. The terrible destruction of the City of London, in which 10 Wren churches were hit in a single night of bombing in December 1940, made a psychologically shocking alteration to the townscape. The historic connections of the bomb sites were now poignant: the Guildhall, site of Lady Jane Grey's trial in 1553; Middle Temple Hall, where Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was performed in February 1601; St Giles's Church in Cripplegate, where John Milton had been buried. England's ancient buildings seemed all the more important to record when the fear of losing them was imminent. The setting-up of the Recording Britain Scheme, followed by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, created a new wave of Romantic art in Britain. John Piper, who received many commissions through these channels, recalled the renewed visionary feeling of that time: "Objects we had not been able to look at, let alone see, because of other artists' visions of them, now became of great visual and emotional importance."

Piper painted the interior of Coventry Cathedral in November 1940, working from sketches made the morning after the raid that had destroyed it. The fabric of the building was still smouldering. In 1942 and 1943 he recorded Windsor Castle, at Queen Elizabeth's request. In the middle of the war he was also working at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, a commission from its occupant, Sir Osbert Sitwell, that resulted in about 50 paintings and drawings of the house and grounds, the Gothic temple, the wilderness, the lake. Piper's tenebrous and often moonlit wartime paintings are landscapes without figures. But they are vistas redolent with history and dynasty, in which the peopling of the landscape is implied.

The art of the second world war deals in distant, eerie memories. Henry Moore's London Underground shelter drawings show the swaddled-up forms of some remote tomb burial. The photographer Bill Brandt was despatched by Picture Post to summon up the spirit of Hadrian's Wall, the implication being that Britain was a land of ancient marvels to be revered and protected at all costs. Conjuring the ghost of Chaucer, Michael Powell made A Canterbury Tale in Kent , a film replete with the fears and frissons of the period. The Gormenghast generation of artists - Ceri Richards, Michael Ayrton, Mervyn Peake - worked in a condition of high-pitched historicism, in which Celtic, Gothic, Romantic and contemporary mingled. In 1945, that most brilliantly tormented designer, Leslie Hurry, celebrated victory with a painting entitled This Extraordinary Year . A lurid and pullulating scene of banner-waving victors trampling over blood-stained corpses, Hurry's painting is a conscious reworking of Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades .

The enduring centrality of narrative was discussed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his 1955 Reith Lectures, later published as The Englishness of English Art . The art historian, who had trained and worked in pre-war Germany, had the advantage of seeing the art of England with fresh eyes and was sensitive to the urge for island storytelling, the mood of Romantic retrospection that dominated English culture in the 1950s as the country struggled to recover from the war.

I was a child at the Festival of Britain, now regarded as the moment when the English saw the light of modernism and the people started dancing on the Fairway. What I remember was something far more sonorous, an almost preachy atmosphere of reconnection and reconsideration in the South Bank exhibition dedicated to the "people" and the "land". Design historians itemise such iconic products as Race steel-rod chairs with ball feet, harbinger of the impending consumer revolution. My child's eyes focused with more interest on the amiable whimsy of Eric Anmonier's recreation of Tenniel's white knight in the "lion and unicorn" pavilion.

The festival was actually a very bookish exhibition in which the literary-historical art of mural flourished. In the "lion and unicorn", Kenneth Rowntree's Freedom mural, a long, large, painted pageant showing scenes from English history, was the unifying feature. John Hutton's seafarers adorned the "sea and ships" pavilion. For "minerals of the island", Josef Herman provided a muscular Mural of Miners, judged by some critics to be edging too close to Soviet industrial triumphalism. The revival of the mural had its parallel in real-life historic re-enactments. Children and adults, we were all re-peopling like crazy in 1951. As part of the festival arts programme, there was a Shakespeare festival in Stratford, a Regency festival in Brighton, a gathering of the clans in Edinburgh, a St Fagan's folk festival in Cardiff. In Coventry an embarrassed Lady Godiva rode again.

This emotional, pictorial response to past events lasted on through the coronation two years later. The ruminative Romanticism of the time, the year of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana , is wonderfully evoked by AS Byatt in The Virgin in the Garden , the first of the quartet of novels just completed with A Whistling Woman .

In the 1960s and 1970s, artistic interest in Romanticism was overshadowed, sometimes more or less obliterated, by formalism and American-influenced abstraction, only to re-emerge again in the 1980s. If this seems unlikely in the materialistic, hedonistic atmosphere of Thatcher's Britain, one has to remember in what ways Romanticism has been a retaliatory movement. Romanticism re-emerged at the time when concern for the environment was heightening, an age of new awareness of the mystic and organic. Re-awakened interest in narrative painting coincided with the neo-Romantic revival in fashion and in pop.

In the late 1980s, two important retrospective exhibitions redefined Romantic art for a post war generation. Both were generated by John Hoole at the Barbican. The first, which opened in 1987, was A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-53. The sequel, two years later, was The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art, Burne Jones to Stanley Spencer. Together they made a totally convincing claim for the lasting artistic influence of the subjective view of history, the staying power of the individual vision. In his paintings Stanley Spencer is the sublime re-peopler, bringing Jesus Christ to Cookham, staging Biblical crowd scenes on the banks of the Thames.

Are we still re-peopling? Perhaps now more than ever. Romanticism as a way of reading history was born in the post French-revolutionary turmoil of the early 19th century, as Europe's known political structures were being torn apart. There is now a comparable sense of dislocation. It is not sheer coincidence that Blair is an enthusiastic reader of Sir Walter Scott. Nor is it so surprising that Simon Schama's television series, A History of Britain , should have proved so popular. Schama's programmes are so enticingly mobile and emotionally charged, with their personal narratives that illuminate the factual and their Scott-like manipulation of the scenic. They draw the viewer into the sweep and surge of history, offering the human consolations of the cyclical, reminding us that millions in the past have endured great fears and sufferings, comparable with ours.

Most strikingly, these programmes reinforce the historic relationship with landscape. The heather and bogland of the Field of Culloden. The Chartists assembling on Kennington Common. The shamblingly heroic withdrawal from Dunkirk. These are landscapes with a multitude of figures, in which something momentous is taking place, and they unfurl like a whole sequence of large-scale Romantic paintings, shimmering with feeling. Schama and his producers have understood, and made the most of, democratic human values of shared memories and myths, the invocation of mysteries, the Romantic necessity for hearing secret harmonies that is latent in us all.

· Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics is at Tate Britain from February 5 to May 11.

· Fiona McCarthy is the author of Byron: Life and Legend, published by John Murray, price £25 and curator of Mad, Bad and Dangerous, The Cult of Lord Byron at the National Portrait Gallery to February 16. She will be lecturing on "Lord Byron and the Romantic Imagination" at Tate Britain on March 19 at 6.30pm.